Short videos and live broadcasts are becoming new engines for book sales. New book launches have been held in live broadcast rooms, and more and more writers have joined the live broadcast platform. Many consumers have gradually developed the habit of watching live broadcasts and buying books. Data shows that in the first quarter of this year, on the Douyin e-commerce platform alone, live streaming of books with goods was viewed more than 3.9 billion times, book sales exceeded 150 million orders, and an average of more than 2 million books were sold every day. The advantages of
’s live broadcast of selling books are obvious. On the one hand, social attributes and emotional value are affecting consumption decisions on a deeper level. Through live broadcast, consumers can not only understand the connotation of books intuitively and three-dimensionally, but also interact with authors, publishers, and anchors to discover the stories behind book creation. On the other hand, the number of online audiovisual users in our country exceeds 1 billion. Live broadcast has transformed many short video users into reading groups, allowing books to increase their exposure with the help of the powerful traffic of the Internet. Personalized content presentation and interest recommendation mechanisms have also attracted some niche audiences. Segment your books to accurately find your audience. In addition, consumers can place orders with one click in the live broadcast room, resulting in shorter book purchasing links and higher sales efficiency.
Books are not just consumer goods. A book retail market analysis report shows that the book retail market will decline by 7.04% year-on-year in 2023. How to leverage live streaming to enrich sales channels, stimulate consumer demand, and expand living space seems to have become a must-answer question in the publishing industry. First of all, we need to find incremental markets and growth points in the live broadcast room. When releasing new books, it is necessary to reasonably arrange the content, frequency and time of live broadcasts to make the sales life cycle more lasting and consistent. It is also necessary to seize the opportunity to discover buried slow-selling and unpopular books and strive to achieve the "popularization" of existing books. Secondly, make good use of the interactive nature of live broadcasts to face consumers directly, obtain reader feedback and understand reader needs through comments, barrages, etc., plan and improve book versions in a timely manner, increase the stickiness of new and old readers, and turn live broadcasts into an effective channel for building brands. Thirdly, "knowledge delivery" requires the anchor to not only accurately grasp the connotation and value of a book, but also have an understanding of different reading needs and capture the points of convergence between books and readers. Publishers should strengthen the professional capacity building of their teams and cultivate their own high-quality anchors.
live broadcast has lowered the reading threshold, but we must also note that some traffic-only and price war tactics have aggravated problems such as piracy and infringement. If not dealt with in a timely manner, the rights and interests of consumers, authors, publishers, and platforms will be harmed. It is not conducive to the long-term healthy development of the content industry.
The spread of piracy on the Internet is highly concealed, fast, and diverse. It is difficult for the platform to identify and crack down on it. The cost of rights protection and evidence collection for publishers is high, and multiple parties need to work together to build a governance system. Platforms must improve copyright protection and monitoring mechanisms, verify the identities and qualifications of business entities, and restrict, block, and remove anchors and merchants who violate laws or regulations or harm consumer rights; publishers must improve infringement warnings and infringement management and other rights protection mechanisms, promptly complain and report when infringement is encountered, and achieve rapid and effective protection of copyright; consumers should enhance their ability to distinguish authenticity from fakes, not be fooled by low prices, and consciously resist infringing and pirated books; relevant departments should improve the normalized supervision mechanism and optimize the network Supervise technical means to guide the orderly development of book sales in the field of live broadcasting.
looks forward to close collaboration between relevant entities, online and offline, to jointly maintain the book market ecology and promote the healthy development of reading for all.
text/Zeng Shiyang
picture source/Visual China
editor/Ji Yuan
